Who are those folks lining up for Ferraris? / They start at a whopping $255,000 and get just 11 mpg

Warren Brown, Washington Post

Published
4:00 am PST, Friday, January 12, 2007

2007-01-12 04:00:00 PDT New York -- The fuel economy is so low that most Ferrari dealers seldom bother mentioning it. But on a good day -- one during which city streets and highways remain free of traffic -- the 2006 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano gets 11 miles per gallon.

Such days are rare, especially in New York City. Here, streets are so clogged that many motorists are afraid to drive for fear of losing their parking spaces. When they venture into traffic, they often move along slowly or sit in clogged lanes with engines running, going nowhere, wasting gas.

In that environment, the driver of a 599 GTB Fiorano would be lucky to get nine miles per gallon.

Still, according to a front-page article that appeared in the New York Times on Christmas Day, a Ferrari dealership near New York City had a waiting list of 50 for the 599 GTB, a car that starts at $255,000, even though the dealer expected to get just one more in stock.

I know that Ferrari is a low-volume company producing 3,500 automobiles annually for wealthy clients around the world. But I was still shocked by the story in the Times.

Who spends that kind of money on such wondrously impractical, prodigiously consumptive cars?

The Times said the customers were largely Wall Street bonus recipients -- stock traders, money-changers, bankers and arbitrage specialists, people who were rewarded handsomely -- including a $53.4 million bonus for one individual for one year's work -- for their prowess in making a deal.

They have money to burn. Presumably paying for the cost of burning petroleum in a 620-horsepower car is no problem for them.

I called several Ferrari dealerships in that area, including Miller Motorcars of Greenwich, Conn., one of the largest Ferrari stores in the region and the one mentioned in the Times article. The rich are different from you and me, and so are the companies and salespeople who have them as clients. They are circumspect, suspicious. They are befuddled by the questions of commoners, an attitude best summed up by the paraphrased response: What exactly is it you do not understand about our exceptionally wealthy customers wanting to buy a Ferrari?

But at Miller Motorcars, I got a salesman to open up, provided I did not use his name: "I do not want my name in your paper. You will not put my name in your paper."

OK, OK.

"Bonuses!" our Miller Motorcars salesman huffed. "Well, yes, many of our clients work on Wall Street. But you must understand that we only had eight 599 GTBs available. All of those cars were spoken for months ago, months before Wall Street issued bonuses."

"You mean the buyers put in their orders in anticipation of bonuses?"

The Miller Motorcars salesman was too savvy to answer that one.

"These are people who owned other Ferrari cars," he said. "They love Ferrari. They want every new Ferrari. They order in advance. Some of them wait a year or more to get their car."

I was beginning to understand. It's not about greed, the profligate spending of deal-making money on motorized baubles. It's about love, and love makes you do seemingly irrational things, such as buying a car that moves from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds in a region where traffic seldom moves at all, such as driving a $255,000 automobile into the mayhem of Connecticut, New Jersey or New York traffic.

But in the 599 GTB Fiorano, at least it's cozy. There is ample room for two people in the car, which has a bit more interior volume than the Ferrari 550/575 Maranello, which it replaces. It also has enough trunk space for a bag of golf clubs -- 11.3 cubic feet, storage room created by moving the Fiorano's massive six-liter V-12 engine up front, instead of situating it immediately behind the car's cabin, as in classic Ferrari cars.

I am told by Ferrari dealers and enthusiasts that the owners of these exotics seldom drive them on crowded, mean city streets. Instead, they prefer taking them to private tracks and other high-speed venues where they can race them about.

Except, well, I don't understand that, either. Making all of that bonus money buying and selling companies that they did not build or run; putting together deals that often have the unhappy effect of putting many people out of work; and trading stocks whose value is derived from services the traders don't actually deliver and from products they neither develop, design, make nor sell take a lot of hours off the clock. When do they have the time to go to the track?